


Contrasts

by idelthoughts



Category: Uprooted - Naomi Novik
Genre: Gen, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 09:50:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7710475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idelthoughts/pseuds/idelthoughts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kasia is a bodyguard; Kasia is a babysitter.  She is a warrior, and she is a guardian.  She is equipped for neither role.  She is at once too hard and too soft for both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Contrasts

Kasia is a bodyguard; Kasia is a babysitter. She is a warrior, and she is a guardian.

She is equipped for neither role. She is at once too hard and too soft for both.

She fights because she has to. She becomes a warrior because her body is hard, and there is a hole in their lives that must be filled—they need a champion. She’d been whittled into shape, made into a weapon, and so that is what she becomes. She takes up a sword and swings it because she must. Agnieszka relies on her blade now, just as Kasia has always relied on Nieshka’s strength of spirit. She can’t deny what must be done, what needs to be done, just because her heart is too soft. She can’t cease swinging and fighting and killing and destroying just because every blow sticks another needle in her too-tender soul.

She will remember the face of every man who falls before her blade, her fist, her boot. Kasia’s enemies will remember her as cold, white, untouchable; they will think her immovable, implacable. They will never see the nights spent curled around the bleeding heart trapped beneath wooden skin, unable to heal because she is iron outside, and too soft inside. Her skin will never be marred, but her heart will never heal.

She is too soft to be a proper warrior, though she’s learned enough to fake it. She has even learned to convince herself, to stand straight and tall with command, to lead as well as follow. But even when she is settled, when she has grown old, when these many days and nights of war and struggle are behind her, her heart will ache whenever she looks back. She knows her heart will never harden to the same strength as her skin, though so many experiences should have made it so.

Maybe it is Agnieszka who keeps her heart too soft. Nieshka, who can coax a smile from Kasia with only a look, who is more home than any place could ever be. Maybe so long as Kasia knows her, so long as she loves her, her heart will always be as soft as when they were children.

Or maybe it is the children she loves now, Stashek and Marisha, who keep her so soft. They gaze at her with such trust, such love—but she is too hard for them, and it wounds her too-soft heart once more.

They wish to play, to frolic. They treat her as a tree to climb, her arms and legs just limbs to dangle from if she holds them out, and they laugh and laugh, and she laughs with them at their silly games, willing to be the mountains they conquer, just to hear their joy.

But a careless move and they are so easily hurt—a swing of her arm as they run to her, and a scream that tears a piece of her heart new, and a bruise that takes weeks to heal. A toy, placed in her care, given with innocent trust, and she forgets; just one careless moment, and she crushes it to dust. Marisha cries, inconsolable, but Stashek bites his lip and lifts his chin, sweetly declaring it an accident, and he didn’t much care for that toy anyway. Kasia searches high and low to find a replacement, though she cannot match the original. It pains her for long after the children have forgotten it.

Kasia is not a careless person, but the fear she has in every moment with the children will not leave her. She wants to embrace them as they clamber on her, but she fears that in a moment of inattention, she will crush them as she crushed their toys, as she crushed the delicate fairy house they built from leaves and shells on the beach and begged her to help carry home from the shore. Her body is an iron mallet, striking and destroying when she does not keep herself perfectly, carefully controlled.

She loves the children, and when she sits on warm nights they climb on her. Marisha tells her she is wonderfully cool against the hot air, and cuddles into the crook of her arm. Stashek, more reserved, sits on her knee and proudly tells her the names of the constellations he has learned. And Kasia—she is careful to be still, as still as the hard rock her body resembles, the iron wood she is made of.

And she manages it—she is immovable, unyielding, still—until Marisha nods off in her lap, soft snores rumbling, face smashed into Kasia’s shoulder. Stashek loses his train of thought, forgets which constellation he was speaking of before the yawn, and leans against Kasia’s chest. His breathing grows soft and steady, joining his sister’s little snores—and how she protests she does not snore, but she does, and Kasia loves every little sound. She knows Stashek is nearly asleep because he doesn’t comment on it, even though he finds it great fun to tease his sister that she sounds like a piglet when she sleeps. Kasia rocks slowly and Stashek blinks long and slow.

Kasia is hard, but they treat her as a pillow, as a soft place to land, to curl up in safety, like she is a nest for them. They must be uncomfortable against the hard, unforgiving planes of her body, but still they rest easy in her arms, insistent that she hold them, that she show the love she holds inside for them. She rocks slowly, and Stashek’s eyes blink close for the last time. His hand falls off his lap and across his sister’s leg, and they are two warm bundles sleeping in the circle of her arms.

Very carefully, she closes the embrace. Careful, slow, until the press of their ribs is tangible on her forearms, and then no farther. She hugs them, loves them, too hard and too soft all at once.

She will fight as she must, kill if she must, though it hurts. She will love as she can, show it as she can, though she fears how cruel her carelessness can be. She is too hard, and too soft, to truly be right for either job.

And yet, this is who she is. She holds herself steady, and does her best.


End file.
